RADICAL FEMINISM

INTRODUCTION

→ In one sense, all feminism is, by definition, ‘radical’, challenging the

central tenets of legal and political thought and demanding full citizenship
for women in society.
→ Radical feminism has developed its own distinctive critique of society
which separates it from -- although intersections remain -- liberal
feminism, cultural/difference feminism, and Marxist-socialist feminism.
 INTRODUCTION

→ Where liberal feminists accept the meritorious tenets of liberalism and

work within the dominant political ideology to achieve law reforms, radical
feminists demand a root and branch reform of society.
→ Women’s sexuality lies at the heart of the radical feminist debate. Thus,
radical feminists analyse how men's sexuality is expressed in forms which
result in women’s inequality.
 INTRODUCTION

→ Radical feminism, therefore, unlike liberal feminism, does not accept that
equality will be achieved for women, provided the legal inequalities and
disabilities are removed from the law. Rather than constructing on specific
legal inequalities, radical feminism challenges the core structure of society
and law by focusing on its patriarchal ordering and its representation of
patriarchal culture and mores.
→ Radical feminism is, thus, deeply critical at the level of society’s structure.
 INTRODUCTION

→ From its broadly left-wing political origins in the 1960s and characterized
principally by white, middle-class, heterosexual, academic women, radical
feminism has evolved as a key challenger to the societal status quo.
→ In the 1970s, radical feminists subjected various patriarchal legal and
social attitudes and concepts to analysis, like rape.
 INTRODUCTION

→ It is important to point out that radical feminism does not represent a

‘single school of thought’: radical feminism is, in fact, diverse.
→ However, in radical feminism’s insistence on the universality of patriarchy
and women's oppression, based on women's sexuality and consciousness-
raising as a technique for the expression of women's oppression, radical
feminism occupies a distinctive vantage point.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ Radical feminists believe that in contemporary society an individual sex is

the single most influential factor in determining her social position, her life
experiences, her physical and psychological constitution, her interests, and
her values.
→ The distinction between the sexes, a distinction defined originally by
reference to procreative function, is used to structure every aspect of
human nature and human social life.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ Radical feminists believe that the bifurcation between male and female
experience means that every society has 2 cultures --- the visible, national,
or male culture and the invisible, universal, female culture.
→ Males define and control all the institutions of all ‘national’ cultures--
including every purportedly socialist nation that has ever existed.
→ The female culture is based on “the cooking, cleaning, and child-raising
chores of the society.”
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ Radical feminists believe that the dominant male culture or patriarchy

promulgates a certain picture of social reality, a picture that is colored by
male values.
→ Male culture emphasizes values such as positive, forceful, aggressive,
dominant, objective, strong, etc. Female culture is seen as weak, passive,
emotional, intuitive, unresponsible, quarrelsome, etc.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ Although these characteristics are considered undesirable for men, the

patriarchy considers that at least some of them are appropriate for women.
Passivity, vanity, subservience, and self-sacrifice are not masculine virtues,
but the male culture accepts and even values these qualities in women.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ The male picture conceals the destructive values that underlie the male culture and
obscures the positive contributions of the female culture.
→ According to radical feminists, Liberal and Marxist feminists have internalized the
values of the male culture. They want women to live according to male standards.
→ Radical feminists, by contrast, challenge the values of the male culture. They do
not want women to be like men. Instead, they want to develop new values, based
on women's traditional culture.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ They are “proud of the female principle and do not want to deny it to gain
women's freedom.”
→ The only aspects of female culture to be rejected are “all those that keep us
subservient, such as passivity, self-sacrifice, etc.”
→ It is interesting to note that radical feminists seem to share certain values
with the patriarchy. Both patriarchy and radical feminism, for instance,
value power and strength, and neither admires passivity or subservience.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ It is perhaps closer to the truth to say that radical feminism rejects some of
the values of the patriarchy outright, but it accepts others with reservations.
→ The reservation depends on a feminist reinterpretation of traditionally
accepted values. Joyce Trebilcot calls these reinterpretations “feminist
reconceiving”
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ Feminist re-conceiving may involve a shift in the descriptive meaning of a

concept, in its evaluative meaning, or both.
→ An example is the concept of strength. Under patriarchy, a woman is not
viewed as strong unless she is unattached and unattractive to men, often
because of her age. If a man is around to protect her, then the term ‘strong’
is reserved for him.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ By contrast, the feminist view of a strong woman allows a young or

conventionally beautiful woman to be strong and allows her strength to be
expressed in struggles with men.
→ They also believe that strength is more likely to be indicated by flexibility
than by rigidity.
 CULTURE ACCORDING TO RADICAL FEMINISM

→ Thus, radical feminists seek new values around which to organise society.
They are looking for a way of expressing their vision of wholeness, which
will transcend the patriarchal dualisms of self and world, nature and spirit,
reason and emotion.
→ In part, radical feminist values are inspired by women's spiritual or
mystical experiences of connectedness with non-human nature or with
other women.
 PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE SPHERE

→ Much of the radical feminist critique of women's oppression focuses on

gender domination in intimate relations and many of their proposals for
social change concern the reorganisation of the so-called private rather than
the so-called public political sphere.
→ Radical feminism popularised the slogan “the personal is political.”
 PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE SPHERE

→ One meaning of this slogan is that sexual politics, the systematic male
domination of women, and women's resistance to this domination occurs in
the so-called private as much as in the so-called public sphere.
→ For radical feminists, the slogan has an additional meaning: that women's
experience in personal life can provide the inspiration and the basis for a
new vision of politics.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

(1) Patriarchy:
 The radical feminist analysis of women’s oppression exposes the
destructive quality of women’s relations with men and shows how that
destructiveness is rooted in the systematic coercive power that men have
over women.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 Under patriarchy women are seen as beings whose special function is to

gratify male sexual desires and to bear and raise children.
 Patriarchy defines women as natural mothers or as sexual objects.
 However, radical feminists believe that women under patriarchy are forced
mothers and sexual slaves.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

(2) Forced Motherhood:

 Under patriarchy the conventional wisdom of centuries has linked and
sometimes identified women with motherhood.
 Patriarchal ideology has explained and justified the connection between
women and children in a variety of ways.
 Sometimes, remen have been thought to possess a maternal instinct or some
innate capacity for nurturance that is supposed to make them especially well-
suited for child-rearing.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 A successful ideology is never straightforwardly false; it does not describe the

world as totally other than it is. Instead, a successful ideology is a seductive
blend of truth and misrepresentation that distorts and obscures the facts rather
than denying them completely.
 According to radical feminism, the patriarchal ideology does exactly this. It
identifies many of the special qualities that women develop as mothers, but it
obscures the fact that these qualities are developed in a situation of domination.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 Radical feminists assert that women are forced to be mothers. Patriarchy has many
means of compulsions.
 Contemporary patriarchy deprives young women of adequate contraceptive
information, and the contraceptives it does make available are inconvenient,
unreliable, expensive, and sometimes dangerous.
 Patriarchy limits abortions and often seeks to deny them entirely, but at the same
time, it subjects women to intense and unremitting pressure to engage in sexual
relations.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 According to patriarchal ideology, motherhood is the only way in which a

woman can discover true fulfillment and genuine respect. Women who are
unable to bear children are pitied; those who do not want to do so are
described as “immature”, “unfeminine”, “unnatural” or selfish.
 The poor conditions and low pay of most jobs available to women compel
them into marriage, and having children is invariably the price a woman
must pay in return for support from a man.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 Even when women engage in paid labour, radical feminists assert that they are often
expected to perform for other adults, the same kind of nurturing tasks that mothers
typically perform for their children.
 Mothers under capitalist patriarchy are expected to absorb the impact of two
opposing sets of values. In opposition to our society that values individualism,
mothers are expected to embrace their servitude voluntarily, to sacrifice their own
interests completely to those of others and even to deny that they could have
interests that conflict with those of their children.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 In addition, mothers are expected to create a nest of emotional warmth and

security that will give life to beings.
 Mothers under patriarchy continuously confront a dilemma: should they
rear their children according to the life-giving values of trust and
nurturance that their own experience as mothers allows them to realize,
however incomplete? Should they encourage their children’s desire “to live
openly, creatively trustfully and, safely with others?”
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 Or should they foster instead, the dominant patriarchal values that will
enable their children to be accepted and to survive in male culture?
 Shulamith Firestone discusses how the emergence of feminity in girls and
masculinity in boys is a response not to the difference in their parents’
anatomy but rather to the difference in power between their mothers and
fathers in the context of a male dominant culture.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 On one hand, motherhood is seen as a source of women’s special values and

characteristics, the basis of female culture. On the other hand, motherhood, as it
is institutionalized under patriarchy, is one of the basis of women’s oppression.
 Rearing children is hard and a demanding work. Also, motherhood excludes
women from the public world outside the home. However, what radical
feminists point out, and what no other feminists have stated so clearly, is that
motherhood under patriarchy is forced labour.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 Men determine whether children are born, under what conditions they are
reared, and what counts as successful child-rearing. Women have
responsibility only for the daily details of a process whose totality is male-
controlled.
(3) Sexual Slavery:
 Women, under patriarchy, are sexual slaves. Forced motherhood begins
with sexual coercion.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 With the partial exception of mothers, the male culture defines women as sexual
objects for male pleasure.
 Within the patriarchal culture of advanced capitalist nations, even women's paid
work is sexualised, and “sex appeal” is often an explicitly acknowledged
qualification for “women's jobs.”
 Having defined women as sexual objects, men seek possession of those objects.
They use ideological, economic, legal, and physical coercion to gain sexual
possession of women.
THE RADICAL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S
OPPRESSION

 Radical feminists believe that women, whether they recognise it or not, are
the sexual slaves of men. Consequently, women’s sexual relations with
men are typically that of rape.